## What the Dormouse Said  * Author: [[John Markoff]] * ASIN: [[B000OCXFYM]] * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OCXFYM * Publication: * Publisher: ### Highlights > The idea of personal computing was born in the sixties; only later, when falling costs and advancements in technology made it feasible, would the box itself arrive. The engineers’ insight (Page: 153) > The San Francisco Midpeninsula during the sixties and early seventies witnessed an epochal intersection of science, politics, art, and commerce, a convergence comparable to that at such landmark places in history as Vienna after World War I. (Page: 159) > Stewart Brand has argued in his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies” that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.” (Page: 170) > In fact, the New Left and the counterculture were then split between modern-day Luddites and technophiles. (Page: 174) > the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), made the case that technology could be harnessed for more democratic and decentralized uses. The catalog ultimately helped shape the view of an entire generation, which came to believe that computing technologies could be used in the service of such goals as political revolution and safeguarding the environment. (Page: 176) > you would have captured Engelbart’s Augment research group at SRI, McCarthy’s Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, as well as the hobbyists who made up the People’s Computer Company and the Homebrew Computer Club. (Page: 192) > the West Coast realization that computing was a new medium, like books, records, movies, radios, and television. (Page: 209) > But the Midpeninsula had never been a completely American-as-apple-pie Levittown. There had long been a bohemian fringe in the Bay Area, dating far back to the immigrant culture that created California, and even in the fifties and early sixties there was an undercurrent that ran at cross-purposes to the middle-class mainstream. (Page: 220) > the rise of the military-industrial complex. (Page: 222) > a set of wrenching, mind-expanding LSD parties orchestrated by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters called Acid Tests, which would transform the culture of the Midpeninsula and ultimately the rest of the country. (Page: 237) > LSD was a defining force in a cultural war. (Page: 245) > Over and over again in my research, I ran into engineers and programmers who came to computing research in the sixties to avoid military service. (Page: 251) > He also said that his countercultural roots often left him feeling like an outsider in the corporate world of which he is now a leader. (Page: 271) > The schism between information propertarians and information libertarians (Page: 279) > the hacker’s ethos of sharing information lies at the very heart of the explosive growth of the personal computer. (Page: 290) > “The future’s already arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” (Page: 294) > Just walking through the halls of the SRI laboratory gave a visitor a visceral sense of the cultural gulf that existed between the prevailing model of mainframe computing and the gestating vision of personal computing. (Page: 314) > Engelbart’s notion of creating work groups where human intelligence was instead “augmented” by computers was thought of as quaint and beside the point. (Page: 318) > Sputnik had shocked the nation out of its complacency, and Santa Clara County was quickly becoming an important aerospace and technology center. (Page: 345) > The hunt was on for a new generation of electronic switches that could be squeezed into the cockpits of rocket ships bound for the moon or the nose cones of the ballistic missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. (Page: 350) > He decided that if he could create something to improve the human capability to deal with those challenges, he would have accomplished something fundamental. (Page: 460) > In a single stroke, Engelbart experienced a complete vision of the information age. He saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols. (Page: 461) > In addition to having technical skills, Rosen was a consummate fund-raiser and was the first SRI scientist to go routinely to Washington to begin selling government agencies on research projects. (Page: 555) > Sequoia Seminar, (Page: 690) > It was during one of his visits in 1956 that Heard spoke enthusiastically to Stolaroff about a new drug called LSD. (Page: 696) > Hubbard is intriguing in part because while most popular accounts of the introduction of LSD in America focus on the roles played by author Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary, Hubbard was an earlier proponent, and an important influence in the use of psychedelics by a number of Silicon Valley’s pioneering engineers. (Page: 707) > He found LSD in 1955, and in addition to Huxley, Heard, and perhaps more than one thousand others during the 1950s, he introduced the drug to Stolaroff and indirectly to a small group of engineers who formed a splinter group from the Rathbuns’ Sequoia Seminar. (Page: 710) > Stolaroff’s study group set in motion an unheralded but significant train of events, plunging a small group of technologists into the world of psychedelics almost a decade before LSD became a standard recreational drug on American college campuses. (Page: 736) > Largely with his own financial support, he set up the grandly titled International Foundation for Advanced Study on a quiet side street in Menlo Park. During the next four years, initially charging subjects five hundred dollars to participate in a study of LSD and creativity, the foundation ultimately led more than 350 people, including some of the Valley’s best engineers, through their first psychedelic experiences. (Page: 769) > Woodside, a forested town just northwest of Stanford, was already a bedroom community and retreat, but for an earlier San Francisco financial elite with roots in the California Gold Rush. (Page: 776) > But in the early part of the decade, the counterculture was still bubbling out of Perry Lane. (Page: 794) > NON-COMPULSORY ROTC This seven-day fast is undertaken to express my beliefs that the University of California should respect conscience. (Page: 881) > Fred Moore had fired the opening antiwar salvo of the 1960s. (Page: 885) > “We’ve always gotten along very well,” he said, “but we disagreed on the method of insuring peace. My father feels the best way is for our country to be strong militarily, but I feel this is not the way to achieve peace.” (Page: 902) > “My son is his own person,” Colonel Moore told the reporters. “My son makes his own choices.” (Page: 921) > In any case, although Fred Moore Jr.’s protest ended prematurely, some 1,300 students signed his petition. But his action had a far deeper impact. It was, in effect, a prelude to the Free Speech Movement, which would not take place for another five years. In fact, Fred Moore’s solitary sit-in was in many ways the opening political act of the sixties. (Page: 924) > Direct action was an effective form of protest against large bureaucratic institutions, which would otherwise ignore students’ demands. (Page: 937) > He never intended to provide the spark that would create the personal-computer industry, but was merely attempting to extend his draft-resistance community-organizer politics with the help of an eclectic group of engineering misfits. It just got a little out of hand. (Page: 941) > Doug Engelbart had a clear vision of using computing to help mankind by augmenting human intelligence; Myron Stolaroff was wandering around Johnny Appleseed–style with a new drug he believed would enhance engineering creativity as well as human spirituality; and Fred Moore had set out on a pacifist’s crusade to end war by putting his body on the line. (Page: 948) > In 1959, the four men and their families accordingly started Ridge Vineyards, which ultimately became one of America’s most respected small wineries. (Page: 981) > what J. C. R. Licklider thought of as an “intergalactic computer network” that would weave together an expanding community of scientific researchers and engineers. (Page: 001) > Engelbart pioneered an idea that two decades later became a staple of a new generation of “meeting facilitators” who would tease ideas from a group and then display them on whiteboards or large sheets of paper. (Page: 015) > Engelbart assigned categories for the different personality styles, with a veritable rogue’s gallery of titles including: hairsplitter, pigeonholer, eager beaver, explorer, fence-sitter, superior being, doubting Thomas, wisecracker, dominator, manipulator, belittler, distracter, and silent member. (Page: 019) > Gradually, he began to understand that the AI community was actually his philosophical enemy. After all, their vision was to replace humans with machines, while he wanted to extend and empower people. (Page: 038) > Computers have many capabilities in nonmathematical processes for planning, organizing, and studying: “Every person who does his thinking with symbolized concepts…should be able to benefit significantly.”6 (Page: 066) > Doug Engelbart realized that computing could be more than data processing. Previously, teams of humans had served a single computer; now, the computer would become a personal assistant. (Page: 070) > “associative linking” possibilities, a notion that was to serve as the forerunner of hypertext (Page: 077) > The conflict between ease of use and expert power was one that would plague the inventor throughout his life and years later lead him to say that he had failed in his mission. Eventually, ease versus power became a divisive issue in the computing world. (Page: 216) > He showed up for his daylong LSD session on December 10,1962. Outside of the office was a large oak tree with gnarled, baroque branches that would during the next four years attract the attention of many of the experimenters. The foundation was not far from Roy Kepler’s bookstore and a short walk from the hole-in-the-wall store where the Midpeninsula Free University store and print shop were to locate in the mid-sixties. In another building a block away, Brand later established the Whole Earth Truck Store and the Whole Earth Catalog. About a mile away from the truck store, the original People’s Computer Company settled and in turn was the catalyst for the Homebrew Computer Club in the mid-1970s. The club itself served to ignite the personal-computer industry. (Page: 294) > In retrospect, Taylor’s influence was remarkable, not because he was looking for an immediate application for the computing needs of the military but because he was most interested in funding what he thought of as the avant-garde or even the lunatic fringe. In a crucial period during the 1960s, it was Taylor who made sure that the envelope was pushed. (Page: 517) > The Augment system eventually offered word processing, outline editing, hypertext linking, teleconferencing, electronic mail, a windowing display, online help, and a consistent user interface. (Page: 545) > In their hunger to possess their own computers, the PC hobbyists would miss the crux of the original idea: communications as an integral part of the design. (Page: 551)